The Four Winds(123)

Elsa leaned back against the rusted metal bed frame. Ant resettled himself, laid his head on her lap. She stroked his hair.

Loreda sat opposite Elsa, against the narrow foot of the bed.

“Remember that house I stopped at in Dalhart, on the day we left for California?”

“The big one with the broken window?”

Elsa nodded. “It was big, all right. I grew up there . . . in a house that had no heart. My family . . . rejected me, is I guess the best way to put it. Looks mattered to my family, and my unattractiveness was a fatal flaw.”

“You’re—”

“I am not fishing for compliments, Loreda. And God knows I’m too old for lies. I’m answering your question. This one, and one you haven’t asked in a while. About me and your grandparents and your father. Anyway, my point is that as a girl, I was lonely. I could never understand what I’d done to deserve my isolation. I tried so hard to be lovable.” Elsa drew in a deep breath, released it. “I thought everything had changed when I met your father. And it did. For me. But not for him. He always wanted more than life on the farm. Always. As you know.”

Loreda nodded.

“I loved your dad. I did. But it wasn’t enough for him, and now I realize it wasn’t enough for me, either. He deserved better and so did I.” As she said the unexpected words, Elsa felt them reshape her somehow. “But you know how my life really changed? It wasn’t marriage. It was the farm. Rose and Tony. I found a place to belong, people who loved me, and they became the home I’d dreamed about as a girl. And then you came along and taught me how big love could be.”

“I treated you like you had the plague.”

Elsa smiled. “For a few years. But before all of that, you . . . You couldn’t stand to be apart. You cried for me at naptime, said you couldn’t sleep without me.”

“I’m sorry,” Loreda said. “For—”

“No sorries. We fought, we struggled, we hurt each other, so what? That’s what love is, I think. It’s all of it. Tears, anger, joy, struggle. Mostly, it’s durable. It lasts. Never once in all of it—the dust, the drought, the fights with you—never once did I stop loving you or Ant or the farm.” Elsa laughed. “So, my long-winded answer to your question is this: Rose and Tony and the farm are home. We will see them all again. Someday.”

“They were crazy,” Loreda said. “Your other family, I mean. And they missed out.”

“On what?”

“You. They never saw how special you are.”

Elsa smiled. “That’s maybe the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me, Loreda.”



ON FRIDAY EVENING, AFTER another long day of picking cotton, Elsa and her children snuck out of camp and drove to the end of Willow Road for the strike meeting.

Inside the barn, typewriters clattered; people talked loudly and moved about. Communists, mostly. Not many of the workers were here.

Jack saw them in the doorway and came over. “The growers are getting nervous,” he said. “I heard Welty is fit to be tied.”

“The camp was full of men with guns last night. They didn’t threaten us, but we got the message,” Loreda said.

“We can hardly blame people for staying away,” Jack said.

“The Brennans ain’t comin’,” Ant said. “They said we’re crazy to come.”

“We’re not on grower land. There’s no law saying we can’t talk,” Loreda said.

“Sometimes legal rights don’t matter as much as they should,” Jack said.

Natalia walked up to Jack. As usual she was impeccably dressed, in black pants and a fitted tan blazer with a white silk blouse buttoned to the throat. It was little wonder Loreda idolized the woman. In the midst of a dangerous meeting, she managed to look glamorous and calm. How did a woman become so steady?

“Come,” she said, taking Jack by the arm. “All of you.”

Natalia led them to the barn door.

In the field between the barn and the road, Elsa saw a steady line of vehicles driving toward the barn. One after another, cars parked out front; doors opened. People stepped out, gathered uncertainly; more arrived. More people came on foot across the bare grass pasture.

Elsa saw the way folks moved as they congregated—nervously, eyes darting back to the road and out across the empty fields.

By eight o’clock, Elsa estimated the crowd at over five hundred. More people walked up the road, merged into the audience gathered in front of the barn. They talked among themselves, but quietly. Everyone was afraid to be there, afraid of the consequences of just listening to talk of a strike.

“You should talk to them,” Jack said to Elsa.

She laughed. “Me? Why would anyone listen to me?”

“You know these people. They’d listen to you.”

“Go on,” she said, giving him a shove. “Convince them the way you convinced me.”

Jack hauled a table out from the barn and set it in front of the big double doors, then jumped up on it.

The crowd stilled. Elsa looked out at the familiar faces: folks who’d come from the Midwest or the South, Texas and the Great Plains; folks who’d worked hard all of their lives and still wanted that, who had fallen on such inexplicably hard times that they were confused, undone. All of them thought, or had thought, as Elsa had, that if they could just get an even break, a chance, they could right the ship of their lives.